SLIs, or service level indicators, are powerful metrics of service health. They’re often built up from simpler metrics that are monitored from the system. SLIs transform lower-level machine data into something that captures user happiness.
Your organization might already have processes with this same goal. Techniques like real-time telemetry and using synthetic data also build metrics that meaningfully represent service health. In this article, we’ll break down how these techniques vary, and the unique benefits of adopting SLIs.